[ Kenyon forwarded this excellent essay to me last night. I do support same-sex marriage, but I also share many of the views that Kenyon presents in his essay. Here's another voice on this issue of same-sex marriage that needs to be heard. ]
I was in Atlanta on business when I saw the Sunday, Feb. 29th edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution that featured as its cover story the issue of gay marriage. Georgia is one of the states prepared to add some additional language to its state constitution that bans same sex marriages (though the state already defines marriage between a man and a woman, so the legislation is completely symbolic as it is political). What struck me about the front page story was the fact that all of the average Atlanta citizens whom were pictured that opposed gay marriages were black people. This is not to single out the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as I have noticed in all of the recent coverage and hubbub over gay marriage that the media has been real crucial in playing up the racial politics of the debate. For example, the people who are in San Francisco getting married are almost exclusively white whereas many of the people who are shown opposing it are black. And it is more black people than typically shown in the evening news (not in handcuffs). This leaves me with several questions: Is gay marriage a black/white issue? Are the Gay Community and the Black Community natural allies or sworn enemies? And where does that leave me, a black gay man, who does not want to get married?
Same-sex Marriage and Race Politics
My sister really believes that this push for gay marriage is actually not being controlled by gays & lesbians. She believes it is actually being tested in various states by the Far Right in disguise, in an effort to cause major fractures in the Democratic Party to distract from all the possible roadblocks to re-election for George W. in November such as an unpopular war and occupation, the continued loss of jobs, and growing revelations of the Bush administration’s ties to corporate scandals.
Whatever the case, it is important to remember that gay marriage rights are fraught with racial politics, and that there is no question that the public opposition to same-sex marriages is in large part being financially backed by various right-wing Christian groups like the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council. Both groups have histories and overlapping staff ties to white supremacist groups and solidly oppose affirmative action but play up some sort of Christian allegiance to the black Community when the gay marriage issue is involved. For example, in 1990’s the Traditional Values Coalition produced a short documentary called “Gay Rights, Special Rights, which was targeted at black churches to paint non-heterosexual people as only white and upper class, and as sexual pariahs, while painting black people as pure, chaste, and morally superior. The video juxtaposed images of white gay men for the leather/S&M community with the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, leaving conservative black viewers with the fear that the Civil Rights Movement was being taken over by morally debased human beings. And since black people continue to be represented as hyper sexual beings and sexual predators in both pop culture and the mass media (pimps & players, hoochies & hos, rapists of white women & tempters of white men), conservative black people often cling to the other image white America hoists onto black people as well – asexual and morally superior (as seen in the role of the black talk show host and the role of the black sage/savior-of-white people used in so many Hollywood movies, like In America and The Green Mile, which are all traceable to Mammy and Uncle Remus-type caricatures).
Since the Christian Right has money and access to corporate media, they set the racial/sexual paradigm that much of America gets in this debate, which is that homos are rich and white and do not need any such special protections and that black people are black – a homogeneous group who, in this case, are Christian, asexual (or hetero-normative), morally superior, and have the right type of “family values.” This, even though black families are consistently painted as dysfunctional and are treated as such in the mass media and in public policy, which has devastating effects on black self-esteem, and urban and rural black communities’ ability to be self-supporting, self-sustaining, and self determining. The lack of control over economic resources, high un/underemployment, lack of adequate funding for targeted effective HIV prevention and treatment, and the large numbers of black people in prison (nearly one million of the 2.2 million U.S. prison population) are all ways that black families (which include non-heterosexuals) are undermined by public policies often fueled by right wing “tough on crime” and “war on drugs” rhetoric.
Given all of these social problems that largely plague the black community (and thinking about my sister’s theory), one has to wonder why this issue would rise to the surface in an election year, just when the Democratic ticket is unifying. And it is an issue, according to the polls anyway, that could potentially strip the Democratic Party of it solid support from African-American communities. And even though several old-guard civil rights leaders (including Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Revs. Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson) have long supported equal protection under the law for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community (which usually, but not always means support of same-sex marriage), the right wing continues to pit gay marriage (and by extension, gay civil rights) against black political interests, by relying on conservative black people to publicly speak out against it (and a lot has been written about how several black ministers received monies from right-wing organizations to speak out against same-sex marriages in their pulpits). But many black leaders, including some I’ve been able to catch on television recently despite the right-wing’s spin on the matter, have made the argument that they know too well the dangers that lie in “separate but equal” rhetoric. So, if many of our black leaders vocally support same-sex marriage, how has the Christian Right been able to create such a wedge between the black community and the gay community?
Homophobia in Black Popular Culture
Some of the ways that the Christian Right-wing has been so successful in using same-sex marriage as a wedge issue is by both exploiting homophobia in the black community and also racism in the gay community. In regards to homophobia in the black community the focus of conversation has been about the Black Churches’ stance on homosexuality. It has been said many times that while many black churches remain somewhat hostile places for non-heterosexual parishioners, it is also where you will in fact find many black gays and lesbians. Many of them are in positions of power and leadership within the church – ushers, choir members/directors, musicians, and even preachers themselves. But let me debunk the myth that the Black Church is the black community. The black community is in no way monolithic, nor are black Christians. The vast majority of black people who identify as “Christian” do not attend any church whatsoever. Many black Americans have been Muslim for over a century and there are larger numbers of black people who are proudly identifying as Yoruba, Santero/a, and atheists as well. The black community in America is also growing more ethnically diverse, with a larger, more visible presence of Africans, West Indians, and Afro-Latinos amongst our ranks. We have always been politically diverse, with conservatives, liberals, radicals and revolutionaries alike (and politics do not necessarily align with what religion you may identify as your own). It is also true that we are and have always been sexually diverse and multi-gendered. Many of our well-known Black History Month favorites were in fact Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, or Transgender.
Despite our internal diversity, we are at a time (for the last 30 years) when black people are portrayed in the mass media–mostly through hip-hop culture–as being hyper-sexual and hyper-heterosexual to be specific. Nowhere is the performance of black masculinity more prevalent than in hip-hop culture, which is where the most palpable form of homophobia in American culture currently resides. This of course is due largely to the white record industry’s notions of who we are, which they also sell to non-black people. Remember pop culture has for the last 150 years been presenting blackness to the world – initially as white performers in blackface, to black performers in black face, and currently to white, black and other racial groups performing blackness as something that connotes sexual potency and a propensity for violent behavior, which are also performed as heterosexuality.
And with the music video, performance is important (if not more) than song content. As black hip-hop artists perform gangsta and Black Nationalist revolutionary forms of masculinity alike, so follows overt homophobia and hostility to queer people, gay men in particular. Recently, DMX’s video and song “Where the Hood At?” contained some of the most blatant and hateful homophobic lyrics and images I have seen in about a decade. The song suggests that the “faggot” can and will never be part of the “hood” for he is not a man. The song and video are particularly targeted at black men who are not out of the closet, and considered on the “down low.” Although challenged by DMX, the image of the “down low” brother is another form of performance of black masculinity, regardless of actual sexual preference.
But it’s not just “commercial” rap artists being homophobic. “Conscious” hip–hop artists such as Common, Dead Prez and Mos Def have also promoted homophobia through their lyrics, mostly around notions of “strong black families,” and since gay black men (in theory) do not have children, we are somehow anti-family and antithetical to what a “strong black man” should be. Lesbians (who are not interested in performing sex acts for the pleasure of men voyeurs) are also seen as anti-family, and not a part of the black community. A woman “not wanting dick” in a nation where black dick is the only tangible power symbol for black men is seen as just plain crazy, which is also expressed in many hip-hop tunes. None of these artists interrogate their representations of masculinity in their music, but merely perform them for street credibility. And for white market consumption.
It cannot be taken lightly that white men are in control of the record industry as a whole (even with a few black entrepreneurs), and control what images get played. Young white suburban males are the largest consumer of hip-hop music. So performance of black masculinity (or black sexuality as a whole) is created by white men for white men. And since white men have always portrayed black men as sexually dangerous and black women as always sexually available (and sexual violence against black women is rarely taken seriously), simplistic representations of black sexuality as hyper-heterosexual are important to maintaining white supremacy and patriarchy, and control of black bodies. Black people are merely the unfortunate middlemen in an exchange between white men. We consume the representations like the rest of America. And the more that black people are willing to accept these representations as fact rather than racist fiction, the more heightened homophobia in our communities tends to be.
Race and the Gay Community
While homophobia in the black community is certainly an issue we need to address, blacks of all sexualities experience the reality that many white gays and lesbians think that because they’re gay, they “understand” oppression, and therefore could not be racist like their heterosexual counterparts. Bullshit. America is first built on the privilege of whiteness, and as long as you have white skin, you have a level of agency and access above and beyond people of color, period. White women and white non-heteros included. There is a white gay man named Charles Knipp who roams this nation performing drag in blackface to sold-out houses, north and south alike. Just this past Valentine’s day weekend, he performed at the Slide Bar in NY’s east village to a packed house of white queer folks eager to see him perform “Shirley Q Liquor,” a welfare mother with 19 kids. And haven’t all of the popular culture gay images on TV shows like Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, etc., been exclusively white? No matter how many black divas wail over club beats in white gay clubs all over America (Mammy goes disco!) with gay men appropriating language and other black cultural norms (specifically from black women), white gay men continue to function as cultural imperialists the same way straight white boys appropriate hip-hop (and let’s not ignore that white women have been in on the act, largely a result of Madonna bringing white women into the game.).
There have always been racial tensions in the gay community as long as there have been racial tensions in America, but in the 1990’s, the white gay community went mainstream, further pushing non-hetero people of color from the movement.
The reason for this schism is that in order to be mainstream in America, one has to be seen as white. And since white is normative, one has to interrogate what other labels or institutions are seen as normative in our society: family, marriage, and military service, to name a few. It is then no surprise that a movement that goes for “normality” would then end up in a battle over a dubious institution like marriage (and hetero-normative family structures by extension). And debates over “family values,” no matter how broad or narrow you look at them, always have whiteness at the center, and are almost always anti-black. As articulated by Robin D.G. Kelley in his book Yo Mama’s Dysfunktional, the infamous Moynihan report is the most egregious of examples of how the black family structure has been portrayed as dysfunctional, an image that still has influence on the way in which black families are discussed in the media and controlled by law enforcement and public policy. Since black families are in fact presented and treated as dysfunctional, this explains the large numbers of black children in the hands of the state through foster care, and increasingly, prisons (so-called “youth detention centers”). In many cases, trans-racial adoptions are the result. Many white same-sex unions take advantage of the state’s treatment of black families; after all, white queer couples are known for adopting black children since they are so “readily” available and also not considered as attractive or healthy compared to white, Asian and Latino/a kids. If black families were not labeled as dysfunctional or de-stabilized by prison expansion and welfare “reform,” our children would not be removed from their homes at the numbers they are, and there would be no need for adoption or foster care in the first place. So the fact that the white gay community continues to use white images of same-sex families is no accident, since the black family, heterosexual, same sex or otherwise, is always portrayed as dysfunctional.
I also think the white gay community’s supposed “understanding” of racism is what has caused them to appropriate language and ideology of the Black Civil Rights Movement, which has led to the bitter divide between the two communities. This is where I as a black gay man, am forced to intervene in a debate that I find problematic on all sides.
Black Community and Gay Community – Natural Allies or Sworn Enemies?
As the gay community moved more to the right in the 1990’s, they also began to talk about Gay Rights as Civil Rights. Even today in this gay marriage debate, I have heard countless well-groomed, well-fed white gays and lesbians on TV referring to themselves as “second-class citizens.” Jason West, the white mayor of New Paltz, NY, who started marrying gay couples was quoted as saying, “The same people who don’t want to see gays and lesbians get married are the same people who would have made Rosa Parks go to the back of the bus." It’s these comparisons that piss black people off. While the anger of black heteros is sometimes expressed in ways that are in fact homophobic, the truth of the matter is that black folks are tired of seeing other people hijack their shit for their own gains, and getting nothing in return. Black non-heteros share this anger of having our blackness and black political rhetoric and struggle stolen for other people’s gains. The hijacking of Rosa Parks for their campaigns clearly ignores the fact that white gays and lesbians who lived in Montgomery, AL and elsewhere probably gladly made many a black person go to the back of the bus. James Baldwin wrote in his long essay “No Name in the Street” about how he was felt up by a white sheriff in a small southern town when on a visit during the civil rights era.
These comparisons of “Gay Civil Rights” as equal to “Black Civil Rights” really began in the early 1990’s, and largely responsible for this was Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and a few other mostly-white gay organizations. This push from HRC, without any visible black leadership or tangible support from black allies (straight and queer), to equate these movements did several things: 1) Piss off the black community for the white gay movement’s cultural appropriation, and making the straight black community question non-hetero black people’s allegiances, resulting in our further isolation. 2) Giving the (white) Christian Right ammunition to build relationships with black ministers to denounce gay rights from their pulpits based on the HRC’s cultural appropriation. 3) Create a scenario in their effort to go mainstream that equates gay and lesbian with upper-class and white. This meant that the only visibility of non-hetero poor people and people of color wound up on Jerry Springer, where non-heteros who are poor and of color are encouraged (and paid) to act out, and are therefore only represented as dishonest, violent, and pathological.
So, given this difficult history and problematic working relationship of the black community and the gay community, how can the gay community now, at its most crucial hour, expect large scale support of same-sex marriage by the black community when there has been no real work done to build strategic allies with us? A new coalition has formed of black people, non-hetero and hetero, to promote same-sex marriage equality to the black community, and I assume to effectively bridge that disconnect, and to in effect, say that gay marriage ain’t just a white thing. Or is it?
Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?
I, as a black gay man, do not support this push for same-sex marriage. Although I don’t claim to represent all black gay people, I do believe that the manner in which this campaign has been handled has put black people in the middle of essentially two white groups of people, who are trying to manipulate us one way or the other. The Christian right, which is in fact anti-black, has tried to create a false alliance between themselves and blacks through religion to push forward their homophobic, fascist agenda. The white gay civil rights groups are also anti-black, however they want black people to see this struggle for same-sex unions as tantamount to separate but equal Jim Crow laws. Yet any close examination reveals that histories of terror imposed upon generations of all black people in this country do not in any way compare to what appears to be the very last barrier between white gays and lesbians’ access to what bell hooks describes as “christian capitalist patriarchy.” That system is inherently anti-black, and no amount of civil rights will ever get black people any real liberation from it. For, in what is now a good 40 years of “civil rights,” nothing has intrinsically changed or altered in the American power structure, and a few black faces in inherently racist institutions is hardly progress.
Given the current white hetero-normative constructions of family and how the institutions of marriage and nuclear families have been used against black people, I do think that to support same-sex marriage is in fact, anti-black (I also believe the institution of marriage to be historically anti-woman, and don’t support it for those reasons as well). At this point I don’t know if I am totally opposed to the institution of marriage altogether, but I do know that the campaign would have to happen on very different terms for me to support same-sex marriages. At this point, the white gay community is as much to blame as the Christian right for the way they have constructed the campaign, including who is represented, and their appropriation of black civil rights language.
Along with how the campaign is currently devised, I struggle with same-sex marriage because, given the level of homophobia in our society (specifically in the black community), and racism as well, I think that even if same-sex marriage becomes legal, white people will access that privilege far more than black people. This is especially the case with poor black people, who regardless of sexual preference or gender, are struggling with the most critical of needs (housing, food, gainful employment), which are not at all met by same-sex marriage. Some black people (men in particular) might not try to access same-sex marriage because they do not even identify as “gay” partly because of homophobia in the black community, but also because of the fact that racist white queer people continue to dominate the public discourse of what “gay” is, which does not include black people of the hip-hop generation by and large.
I do fully understand that non-heteros of all races and classes may cheer this effort for they want their love to be recognized, and may want to reap some of the practical benefits that a marriage entitlement would bring – health care (if one of you gets health care from your job in the first place) for your spouse, hospital visits without drama or scrutiny, and control over a deceased partner’s estate. But, gay marriage, in and of itself, is not a move towards real, and systemic liberation. It does not address my most critical need as a black gay man to be able to walk down the streets of my community with my lover, spouse or trick, and not be subjected to ridicule, assault or even murder. Gay marriage does not adequately address homophobia or transphobia, for same-sex marriage still implies binary opposite thinking, and transgender folks are not at all addressed in this debate.
What does gay marriage mean for all Black people?
But what does that mean for black people? For black non-heteros, specifically? Am I supposed to get behind this effort, and convince heterosexual black people to do the same, especially when I know the racist manner in which this campaign has been carried out for over ten years? And especially when I know that the vast majority of issues that my community–The Black Community, of all orientations and genders–are not taken nearly this seriously when it comes to crucial life and death issues that we face daily like inadequate housing and health care, HIV/AIDS, police brutality, and the wholesale lockdown of an entire generation in America’s grotesquely large prison system. How do those of us who are non-heterosexual and black use this as an opportunity to deal with homophobia, transphobia and misogyny in our communities, and heal those larger wounds of isolation, marginalization and fear that plague us regardless of marital status? It is the undoing of systems of domination and control that will lead to liberation for all of ourselves, and all of us as a whole.
In the end, I am down for black people who oppose gay marriage–other folks “in the life” as well as straight, feminists, Christians, Muslims, and the like. But I want more than just quotes from Leviticus or other religious and moral posturing. I want to engage in a meaningful critical conversation of what this means for all of us, which means that I must not be afraid to be me in our community, and you must not be afraid of me. I will struggle alongside you, but I must know that you will also have my back.
Kenyon Farrow © 2004
Interesting.
There are two issues at hand, and I don’t think allot of people really get it. I don’t blanket issue with someone who does not wholehardetly support Gay marriage…but before you flog me and beat me down, let me ‘splain…
What I see as the major threat to not just Lesbian and Gays, but all citizens, are the blatant attempts of the right wing to inject legislation to amend state and federal constitutions to restrict the rights of any group of citizens.
Where our (the Black) community is getting sold a bag of shit is in the fact that and obvious assault on civil rights is being masked behind a moral and religeous issue, neither of which should influence constitutional law. Weather one supports Gay marriage or not is not my concern at the moment. My drive is block any legislation that threatens my civil rights - period - these just happen to be directed at my due to my sexuality.
“But, gay marriage, in and of itself, is not a move towards real, and systemic liberation. It does not address my most critical need as a black gay man to be able to walk down the streets of my community with my lover, spouse or trick, and not be subjected to ridicule, assault or even murder. Gay marriage does not adequately address homophobia or transphobia, for same-sex marriage still implies binary opposite thinking, and transgender folks are not at all addressed in this debate.”
… True, “gay marriage” doesn’t even begin to address any of these issues. And I wholeheartedly agree with most of the arguments presented in the article. But how do we move things forward?
Indeed, the current positioning of “gay marriage” as a civil rights issue simplifies and distorts the discussion. It also blatantly disregards much more pressing systemic issues in our midst.
However, the issue at hand is not “gay” marriage, it’s marriage. The folks who are against “gay marriage” oppose gays, not marriage. Instead of continuing to separate issues, why not imbue it with meaning and proper context as it relates to OUR communities?
There’s a fine line between enabling critical thought and perpetuating the “you aren’t supporting my issues, so why acknowledge yours” mentality. It does not make sense to wonder about the ongoing marginalization of our communities if few take full ownership to ensure that our voices are heard. This debate is only one facet of a broader HUMAN struggle, but the commonalities are rarely emphasized on both sides.
In the end, I don’t care if people are for or against marriage. This is not a congeniality award contest. But condoning a situation where the privileges of marriage are only bestowed upon a certain population (and one has no choice to decide for oneself) - isn’t very credible when asking support for other, much more pivotal struggles.
All that being said, I’m glad for Kenyon’s article. We need more voices speaking up!
i cant argue with this piece, donald because i feel the same way. I just wanted to saythat..
oh yeah and the blog is UP and running. i think i put the link in the URL
RC
Hey y’all. Thanks to Donald for posting my piece (a major NYC indy weekly that shall remain nameless) turned it down, saying it was “inflammatory” and “black nationalist”, which I think speaks to the larger point I was making about who is controlling who gets to speak on this and how, so I have been relying on my friends emailing and posting, which seems to be working quite well…
In any case, I wanted to address some of the comments.
I obviously recognize that the constitutional amendment is fucked up. But so is the way the campaign is being framed, so I would like to think that we have more options that to choose between fucked up and homophobic, and fucked up and racist, which is no kind of choice, and essentially, that is what we are being presented.
I recognize that it is really easy to critique the Right, but people on the left (esp. liberal & progressives) have a hard time accepting critique of the Left.
As a community organizer, I have to remember that this is a campaign, and a campaign is when a group of people (organization or coalition of orgs) get together and decide they are going to demand that the sate (federal, state or city) do something - change a law, dedicate funds to something, amend a law, etc. This is how legislation often comes into being on issues like this. It is usually because some organizations are lobbying. In this case, white gay ones. When groups do campaigns, they have alot of meetings about the message - how they are going to frame the issue in the media, who they want to be the types of faces to deliver that message, what imagery they use to describe the issue, where they are going to target that message and at who.
Given that lesson in community organizing 101, ask yourself why does this message (of the gay marriage campaign) says what it says, who it is targeted at, and who the poster children are. These are decisions that are made. When the media shows up, the images you get in the news and on TV have been carefully chosen (by good organizers anyway), so that the visual image also tells a story without words.
This is how it’s done (now that I have given away all the organizing secrets). And we know from looking at this same-sex marriage campaign that it has been framed to posit white folks front and center. Now, if same-sex marriage becomes law, who do you think will benefit from that???
The black civil rights movement used the same tactics (in some ways invented some of these tactics), and they made a choice (to the dismay of more radical folsk, like James Baldwin)to use basically middle class black people as the primary carriers of the message. Rosa Parks was chosen. The act of not moving on that day was brave, but it was staged. It is what activists and organizers call a civil disobedience.
So, given that the black civil rights movement made a choice to use conservative middle class people as the primary faces, and had a message that was only about legal integration, we have the scenario we have today - the majority of poor black people are no better off (in any statistic you look at) than they were 30 years ago. In many areas, they are worse off. On the other side, you have a few black people like Condi & Colin who work in racist institutions responsible for warmongering and murder, and we are supposed to be proud of that. Has their presence changed the way US foreign policy functions? Have more black cops meant less police brutality, when policing as an institution has not altered?
Having made those comparisons, think about how a message is contructed and conveyed affects who ultimately gets to access what is being fought for. It can be no different for gay marriage.
Why can’t we focus on the fact that everyone should be entitled to health care. Everyone should be entitled to decide who can make decisions for them when and if they cannot. Everyone should be entitled to decide who can visit them in the hospital.
If the “privleges” of marriage were so great, why is the divorce rate over 50%? Why are many married people still poor? Have we not seen in our own families at funerals that even in the presence of a widowed spouse, people still scheme to get what they want regardless of what laws say about who has the ability to make decisions? Does not the state still step in and do shit the departed would never dream of-think of the case of the woman in a coma on life support in Florida, ordered to remain by the governor!)
As far as undoing “isms”, we must be willing to interrogate the institutions that uphold those isms.
If you want to invoke the famous Audre Lorde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, then let us look at what she meant. Isn’t marriage a part of the master’s house (if house being used as a metaphor for institutions?)? Would that “tool” be adding gays and lesbians to that foundation? I didn’t know Ms. Lorde, but having read the speech and context in which she said that quote, I think I can safely say that that is what she meant.
In struggle,
Kenyon
“Now, if same-sex marriage becomes law, who do you think will benefit from that???”
I will benefit along with my partner: two men of color. It ain’t about middle class this, or master’s house that. It simply means we will have equality. One of the keys to this debate, IMHO, is that people mislead with talk about gays/lesbians transforming marriage. The “institution” has been transformed countless times. It was transformed when poor people were allowed to wed. It was transformed when inter-racial couples were allowed to wed. Giving equality to our communities will do no more, no less. And the divorce rate is at such high percentages because of one reason: people are human. It’s likely we’ll see the same with many gay/lesbian couples. I do know that partnerships will benefit greatly once equality is in place.
Call me selfish, a follower in the vein of “the master,” whatever. I want my freedom sooner than later.
“It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.” — Audre
I may be wrong, but I take that to mean: make the shit your own.
This was one of the better-written, compelling, insightful pieces of writing about the whole gay marriage hoopla I’ve read in a bit. It was especially compelling to hear from a brotha who questions the viability or desire for “gay” marriage in the first place. While I someday hope to share my gifts with a partner, I’m not sure marriage is the institution that will best hold it. At the same time, I have supported the concept, on the basis alone that it’s something afforded to some adults and not Others.
I’ve been personally bothered by HRC’s ads which act as if Bush’s proposed amendment will be the first time in history discrimination has been penned into law (I’m taking the f’king equal sign off my car). This kind of rhetoric further alienates black gay folk who don’t have the luxury to isolate our gayness as a sole source of oppression. It becomes more and more obvious to me that white gays see the gay community as white, and don’t seem to care about a presentation of these rights as something that affects non-upper middle class white gay folk. I’ve been learning more an more towards dis-identifying with “gay” the more this happens… and while I don’t think that SGL is the term for me, I am a man who loves men and who believes in the political efficacy of a unifying term. What to do? discussion is certainly a beginning. We need an movement that captures these concerns.
my twenty-five sense,
Tim’m
In the perfect world, maybe ‘marriage’ would be merely a religious issue and would carry NO state-sponsored legal benefits or responsibilities - but instead state-sponsored legal benefits and responsibilities would be available to all individuals and family structures. In the perfect world, our self-defined families would have elder-care benefits, childcare, immigration, authority to make healthcare/fiscal decisions for our loved ones when they have been suddenly incapacitated - these are benefits we are all entitled to. As it stands now, if you are gay, you have to have money to be able to legally protect yourself. Once we have the right to marry in eyes of the law, then the poor will have access to these benefits as well. Not just the wealthy.
Well-off queer white chick here, following a link from a well-off queer white guy and re-posting my comment to him:
When I was a linguistics student at NYU, I took a class on African-American Vernacular English, at the time better known as “ebonics”. (My father said, “I’m paying for my daughter to learn how to talk like a drug dealer?”) We watched several movies on the subject of “black talk” and different aspects of black culture. One of those was Paris is Burning, and others were the autobiographical work of a gay black man living with and dying from AIDS. My final paper was on the topic of the linguistic similarities between gay communities and black communities, and I did a great deal of research on the subject, including vernacular research such as grabbing every anthology I could find of same-sex erotica by people (mostly men) of color.
From that perspective, I’m totally in agreement with a lot of what you say (though not the conclusion; I’d be more likely to say that same-sex marriage is irrelevant to most concepts of family within major black communities in the U.S.), and this in particular deeply resonates with me:
I want to engage in a meaningful critical conversation of what this means for all of us, which means that I must not be afraid to be me in our community, and you must not be afraid of me. I will struggle alongside you, but I must know that you will also have my back.
Oh yeah.
When people call what happened at SF City Hall “another Stonewall”, I flinch. I grew up down the street from Stonewall. I know what happened there. No one was beat up at City Hall; no one died; and the orchestrator there was a straight white man being generous with something that may not even be his to give, not a bunch of angry mostly-non-white drag queens taking a stand for what they knew was theirs to take. I agree that it would be wonderful if people had actually learned anything from Brown v. Board of Ed on the subject of separate and equal, but since it’s obvious that most people haven’t, for gods’ sakes, let’s take a moment to look at the men and women and children who that decision was supposed to benefit and see whether they’ve gotten anything out of it.
Of course, part of the reason many same-sex marriage activists think that they can wave “separate isn’t equal” around and make it stick is because they’ve never seen firsthand just how unimplemented that particular standard is. No wonder they’re the target of derision from people who live with it every day.
I’d like to get Paris is Burning into theaters again. I want queer activists to remember who planted that section of our roots. I don’t think that same-sex marriage has to wait for racial equality, any more than I think that racial equality has to wait for same-sex marriage, and that’s where I think this essay is fundamentally incorrect; but it’d be awfully nice to see some public respect for the people who fought to make the words “separate but equal” both familiar and absurd to so many people, who laid the foundation upon which this whole campaign rests. Don’t take it for granted, the way heterosexuals can take marriage for granted. We take something for granted because we don’t know what it’s like not to have it. Right now the “something” is lip service to racial equality, even as we fight against lip service to orientation equality. I agree that it’s absolutely time to aim for more than that, on all fronts.
Do I “not deserve” the benefits of Civil Rights legislation because I’m not-white not-black? Do I “not deserve” the benefits because one side of my family comes from money, even if it’s several generations back and on the other side of an ocean? Do I “not deserve” it until I have been physically bloodied, myself?
It is a civil rights issue, just as the right of Asian immigrants to become naturalized citizens was a civil rights issue. It’s not always about white and black.
I believe strongly that legalizing gender-blind marriage will help hasten the day when homophobia has less support. I believe that the ruling in the Loving v. Virginia case was a good thing, and that it directly lead to my being able to choose my partners without regard to ethnicity. I hope one day to be able to choose my partners similarly without regard to gender.
I am a not-white, not-black queer woman, and I support gender blind marriage laws. I resent the way that certain parts of the black community, especially the anti-gay marriage elements of the black queer community, have attempted to write me out of the story.
“If you want to invoke the famous Audre Lorde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, then let us look at what she meant. Isn’t marriage a part of the master’s house (if house being used as a metaphor for institutions?)?”
… well, then let’s get rid of marriage altogether! The issue is not that gays want to be “married”, but that marriage laws privilege a segment of the population over another. Using that metaphor, one cannot selectively dismantle that part of the master’s house yet leave the other rooms intact.
You either renovate the entire house or tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. Favoring one room over the other is exactly what the master would like us to do…
Funny, Jesse Jackson used the same house analogy when he spoke during a conference that GMAD held at Brown University a few years ago. He asked us to be more concerned with the entire ‘house’ (the issues of the Black mainstream) instead of only focusing on our ‘room’ (the issues we have as Black gay men).
He said something like “If there’s a fire, we have to all work together to save the house.” Well, the reality is that the ‘house’ has always been very lovingly decorated by us whose ‘room’ would be in shambles if we depended on any reciprocity. The cute shade of paint we might choose for our ‘room’ can only hide so much of the cracked thin walls that lie beneath held together by scotch tape, distracted by a beautiful plant or a photo. Who is pitching in to help us renovate our room? Who is trying to protect it?
Still, I was proud of the fact that he even showed up to engage us, albeit less so after I actually heard him speak. He seemed to suggest that Black gay people would be taken care of if we just weren’t so gay all the time, but if anybody should know how inept our Black mainstream is to focus on our issues as Black gay men, it should be him.
Thank you for this peice, Kenyon. I think it brings together a great deal of issues and history that many of us have been searching for.
I am 28 years old. Luckily for me, I have always had beef with the HRC and it feels good to have another reason because that little icon is starting to grow on me — it represents a fervent hope!
But also, I liked the class analysis you brought in because most of us are struggling. I liked how you brought in how we are suffering for jobs along with our str8 brethern and that white gays are poor along with us.
Recently, I read this book by George Schuyler entitled Black No More. Schuyler has a bad rep, but I think he was right on within this book. And you are right, this marriage thing has been handled TOO poorly for anyone to even CONSIDER trying to push it through. This year is TOO IMPORTANT (and I fear your sister may be right! although, I did hear about the Christian Right going to B/black churches in Detroit to get them all roused up… did you hear about that a coupla months back) to be played with and damnit, folks are starting to sound a tad too whiny in my ear.
We need Jackass O-U-T… and I fear those who support marriage enough to make this their final stand are going to hand him back the office and make all of our lives hell. Imagine the backlash…
Sometimes, I do wish people could think ahead and see the worst that could happen. Maybe then they would at least wait until AFTER Nov.
But at least this has taken some of the spotlight off of Nader’s “decision.”
so called “Conscious” rappers, like Common, Dead Prez and Mos Def, as you mention, are, for the most part, homophobic. but you fail to mention that they are all five percenters. In fact, its pretty remarkable the amount of “Conscious” rappers that are. and I refuse to accept that islam is excempt from the same dogmatic homophobic crap as most other religions, for the simple fact that it isnt. I dont think this is a black or white issue, I think it is an outdated religious dogma issue. that goes for both the black and the white community.
also, “Black people are merely the unfortunate middlemen in an exchange between white men”
frankly, I find this statement both offensive and contemptable, and I think the vast majority of black people who either create or comesume hip hop would also. honestly, this is in its own way a glaringly racist viewpoint.
Wow-ee! Whew! You, Brother Kenyon, have said a mouthful, and more. I am edified and awed by your passion and your argument. However, I disagree with what appears to be your intricately or thinly veiled anti-marriage position for gay and lesbian folk. If that is not your position, then I agree with your ambivalence or fence-straddling.Though I largely agree with you that Blacks and Black gays have been and are used as pawns for the agendas of largely white hetero and non-hetero people/organizations, I steadfastly support marriage for gays as being in our better interest, ultimately. In my most “simplistic” explanation for support of same-sex marriage, I’d have to say that the institution of marriage begets some critically important benefits (as you have mentioned in your essay) to our (Black homo) community. And given what typically happens if/when our Black partners succumb to illness or death (i.e., stolen-possession of mutually-obtained property by our partners’ families; non-access to medical facilities; severe marginilization—and no input—at memorial or funeral services; and other “shit”), WE need every legal right to our partners’ lives and legacies we can attain. Yes, marriage as we know it is a flawed institution. So is our educational system and its supposed rewarding of “merit”. (Shit, I barely make $20K a year with two degrees and a breadth of employable skills/experiences!) So, is access to corporate America flawed. (The glass ceilings have gotten so foggy as they appear to be plastered over.) Capitalism is flawed. All our institutions are flawed. Yet, we have to work with them, re-work them, to change them as best we can. Until, hopefully, we can re-invent or –configure them. If I may pose my point in a metaphorical question: “Must we not go to work to earn a wage because it is the white (racist, homophobic, etc.) man who works beside us or pays us?” I think you must be a part of the “system” to some/whatever degree to best effect change upon it. I ask: “Were not ‘ordinary’ Black women and men walking to white-employer jobs during the Montgomery bus boycotts?” We went to work and we re-worked that unjust back-of-the-bus system. I have no doubts that—in time?—we can re-work marriage and make marriage work for us.
from the other side of the fence…
Blacks should be supportive of gays’ struggle (Miami Herald)
This is indeed an odd twist to the whole gay dispute…but I am for legalizing gay marriage, because my uncle is gay. (I’m strait) I think gays, since they obey the laws, pay their taxes, and are people just like everyone else, deserve equal rights, including in the marriage dispute. Oh well, that’s my oppinoin, now if u excuse me, I’m temporarily being distracted by something shiney…@_@
Hmm, I read Kenyon’s piece some time ago and it was quite an eye-opener. While reading it, my understanding was impaired by two specific deficiences: -
living in the UK, I’m not entirely aware of how the various positions were (are?) being ‘advertised’;
having never thought much about racism beyond ‘it’s just wrong,’ or about race being about a power structure as well as skin colour/ethnic backgroud, a lot of it went straight over my head. (I’m white, does it show? ;) )
I’ve been thinking about it, however. Gay marriage would benefit /me/ by allowing me to marry my partner, male or female. My condensed opinion is that if gay marriage is, as the author succinctly puts it, ‘anti black,’ the problem should be remedied without throwing the baby away with the bathwater - ie. by pointing it out, as Kenyon does, and moving to remedy it, rather than compromising the core principle by withholding support.
I remain annoyed, however - I still feel I’m missing the essence of the article. I offer thanks to the author, for continuing to challenge me.
What is Marriage
Marriage is two people who come together as one. Not any two people- A Man and a Woman. God created Adam and then Eve. It’s amazing that a Man and a Woman can produce a child. No other human combination can. Every man and every woman have the same God-given right to marry and to produce children. It is not right to change the definition of marriage to fit alternative lifestyles. The only correct thing to do is to ask the individual whether they would choose their right to a family or choose their right to live an alternative lifestyle according to their sexual appetites. There will always be the question as to whether homosexuals have a choice in their sexual behaviors: however it is unanswerable. There will always be those who argue on both sides (including “recovered” homosexuals). The bottom line is that every man and woman in this country do have the same right to marry-which is a union with an individual of the opposite sex. Homosexuals are not asking for a right that we all have, they are asking for special privileges. And many in this country believe that making these special interest lifestyles into laws will only serve to further disintegrate the family structure, which is already in dire straits. If anyone is still interested in what God has to say on the subject, here are some Bible verses which make this debate pretty clear: I Corinthians 6:9 – Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God, do not be deceived neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. - 1 Timothy 1:10 - And immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching.
You all have been elected into a very important position. Is it more important to you to make a very vocal MINORITY happy or simply to do what is right? This country was founded on solid Christian values and principles and the new policy seems to be to go with the flow wherever that may lead. It is time we stop buying into the manipulative idea that it is politically incorrect to say that wrong is wrong. Once you blur the lines, who is going to make up the new boundaries? Because I can guarantee you that there will be soon to follow another group on the homosexuals’ heels who will also want the special privileges. You can easily say now that we would never let a man marry a boy, but years ago we would have said that about a man and a man. Once you stand down your job as guard of the principles of this society, it will be very difficult to stop the landslide. Someone has to stand up and be strong. I send this to all of you because the Lord Jesus Christ has put this in my heart. Yes, I am a Christian. But I also don’t believe that you have to share religious beliefs in order to have some conception of what the destruction of morality does to any society.
Rich Nolen Miller
Donna Marie Miller
Walk by Faith not by Sight